Bitter Winter
by Jondy
Summary: Max finds that Zack's shoes are hard to fill when she has to rescue her closest sister...(how's THAT for a concise summary!)


Title: Bitter Winter

Author: Octavia. Muhahahaha. **octavia_hermione@hotmail.com**

Rating: This story is rated PG13. It contains references to abuse, both physical and sexual. Warning warning Will Robinson, my arms are flailing wildly.

Disclaimer: I don't own Dark Angel, FOX and creepy James Cameron do. No money. No money at all. So sad. The writing in italics is from _Romeo and Juliet_, and _MacBeth_, by William Shakespeare. 

Special thanks to: Yin-Chen, cause you're the best friend ever; Ashantai, for writing 'Children of Broken World' which gave me the idea for this; Gillian Rubenstein, for coming up with the muchos dodgy name Presh; and Morgead, who gave me the idea of winter as a feeling, more than a season.

A/N: I dunno about this story, eh. Review and tell me what you think. Sirius Black, I love you. 

*

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Bitter Winter

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Threescore and ten I can remember well:

Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night

Hath trifled former knowings.

This winter was different from all the others Max had experienced. It was bleak, and the wind was so bitter that no one could stand to be out in it for long. Days had no real shape – light grey morphed into dark grey, not the black or blue colour skies were supposed to be. The cold was in everything – in her bones, in her eyes. She could hear it in her ears. 

Jondy was thinner than ever. "I don't want to leave," she said, husky and quiet, like a whisper. The cold was in her voice.

Her face was pale, and her eyes were dead. It was hard filling Zack's shoes, and Max didn't know what to do. Jondy's brown hair made her skin seem even more unnaturally pale and translucent. It was the only part of her that still looked alive. The circles under her eyes were so dark they were purple.

Max wished she could do something, knock some sense into her sister, but the cold was in her too. It slowed her reflexes and her mind was sluggish. She felt like she was fighting through mud to do anything, even think. "Why can't you leave?"

Jondy was looking at her like she wasn't even there. "She needs me."

"Who needs you?"

She didn't answer, didn't give any indication that she had heard. She was already thinking of the girl. 

Max wanted her out of here. She wanted her away from that man. But Jondy was the one sibling that she couldn't just ignore the wishes of. Jondy was her best sister, and Max would never do anything to hurt her. Even if it meant trying over and over to convince her to leave and find a new home, one where this kind of thing wouldn't happen. 

"Jondy!" Max grabbed her sister's arm. Jondy just looked at her tiredly, an insomniac that wants to sleep more than to live. "I want you away from him. I don't want you to hurt any more. He's destroying you, can't you see?" 

Somewhere in her head, she knew Max was right. The rest of her pushed that small voice away, and she went back inside, her footprints in the snow disappearing almost instantaneously.

*

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This wind, you talk of, blows us from ourselves.

He always told her he loved her, and that sometimes it was too much for him to bear. That it was her fault that these things happened to her, because she made him love her so much. That she deserved it. That she was beautiful.

Jondy thought that if she was skinny he wouldn't want her anymore. That if she was a walking skeleton he would be repulsed, and his eyes would stop following her wherever she went. 

It didn't work. She could see every rib and her collarbone stuck out against her chest. Her eyes were too big in her face and her eyelids drooped. And he liked it more, in the way masochism is beautiful to some people, and young girls wish to look like starving models. Her metabolism was inhumanly fast and there was no food, anyway. 

She hated him, and she didn't even want to think of him as human. Jondy knew that some humans were as sick and diseased as he was, but in some ways she thought they were more animal than human. He was a slimy thing that had crawled out from underneath a rock. He was old and mean and ugly and sick. To her he was The Beast. It fitted.

When The Beast had gone to work, like he did everyday, she disentangled herself from the sheets she'd wrapped tightly around herself in a vain attempt to try to keep out the bitter cold. In the mirror she could see new bruises from where he'd held onto her neck last night. She didn't have a top to hide the marks, so she went to try to stop the baby from crying, and injected herself with the needle containing tryptophan like every morning.

The Baby was a baby no more – she was almost five. Jondy still thought of her as a baby, though. She didn't talk yet, and instead watched everything through eyes that were the exact same shape and colour as The Beast's. Her name was Presh. She always refused to let go of her starfish toy. She didn't feed herself. She wet herself everyday. She banged her fists and head against her crib. 

Jondy loved her. Presh loved The Beast. Jondy would never let The Beast do to Presh what he did to her. It was not much of a stretch to imagine that if this was done to the adopted daughter it would be done to the biological daughter as well. 

Jondy stayed because he only needed one girl, and if she left he would start on Presh.

* 

Max was by the tree outside, just like she had been every day since she had arrived. Silently, Jondy walked over to her, shivering in her thin sweater. 

"D'you want to come inside?" 

Max didn't say anything about the new bruises and the smell of blood in the stale indoor air as she took of her scarf and laid it on the kitchen table. Jondy made her some tea, more like hot water than any actual beverage with flavour, and sat down next to Max, Presh on her lap. 

"Is she yours?" Max asked, disinterestedly, like she didn't really care.

"No," said Jondy, relieved that that was the truth. "Her mom is my mom." 

Max raised an eyebrow, before she realised that Jondy meant her adoptive mom. She was surprised – first that any Post-pulse adults had had the heart to adopt an older child, and secondly that Jondy had been able to stay with the mother. Zack would surely have objected. It was dangerous – Manticore's reach was vast, its' claws spreading all over the country.

Instead of voicing these, she asked, "Where is she?"

Jondy didn't meet her eyes. "Gone." In the harsh fluorescent light of the kitchen, her face was grey. 

"Why don't you go?"

Jondy tightened her arms around Presh, blue veins easily seen under white skin. Fading bruises wrapped themselves around her wrists. "Because Presh loves him, and I can't leave her."

Max stared at the strange child. It stared back at her, brown eyes wide and unresponsive. "Why, 'cause he's a good Dad?" Her mouth turned down bitterly, thinking of what he'd done to her sister.

The blue eyes she'd seen light up so many times at Manticore, full of life and laughter and all the other things that come with the naivety of childhood, looked lethargic. They looked at her, eyelids heavy, as if they were behind a veil. Like she was two separate entities: one the abused body; one the mind, the little girl that she had once been.

Max wanted to cry; Jondy had long since used up all her tears. Instead, Max reached for her sister's arm, and she recoiled like she never had when they were younger. For a moment, her eyes were wide and scared, and Max kicked herself for causing her best sister to feel this way. 

The moment passed, and the disinterest that shone dully from Jondy's eyes before replaced the fear. Max sat quietly for a minute, the silence around them ominous, an effect of the cold that pervaded everything.

She should have been hesitant, but instead felt an odd mix of fear and calm. "How long till he gets you pregnant and you end up with another kid that won't speak?" Max said, finally losing her temper with this man who called himself a father, and caused the darkness inside her sister that ate her away from the inside out. In her mind Jondy was a pale, once-beautiful girl, with a dark pain that was spreading. She wanted to get rid of the man who had caused her best sister to become corrupted by the true ugliness of the Outside.

Jondy may have shown surprise on her face, and Max may have been imagining it. She got up from the table and left for the cold outside, the talk and smell of the kitchen making her feel sick.

*

Her adoptive father stroked her cheek, and ran his eyes over her painfully thin body. Jondy pushed down the bile in her throat, and didn't answer when he asked how her day had been. He shrugged, used to not getting a response, and dug his fingernails into her wrist. She didn't give any sign that she felt any pain. When he went to see Presh, she squealed with delight, the first sound other than crying she'd made all day. He tickled her, and talked to her, and Jondy rubbed at the place where he'd touched her with her other wrist, as if removing him from her skin. 

Where he'd touched her was red. It faded quickly, and she could see the intricate pattern of bruises, veins, and lines that some people said showed how many children you were going to have. Jondy had three lines. She hoped that it was just a stupid superstition.

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*

I talk of dreams,  
Which are the children of an idle brain,  
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,  
Which is as thin of substance as the air  
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes  
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,  
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,  
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

Jondy lay in the snow, wishing she could see the stars instead of just dark grey clouds. The cold was all around her, in the ground and the air, inside her, down to her bones. She shivered, but maybe that was another seizure coming on. Either way she didn't care. If she didn't know it was so selfish she would've run away, or slit open the white, blue and purple skin of her thin wrists. 

"I have to protect her. I have to stay or he'll start on her. She'll never forgive me if I take her away from her father," she said to herself, or maybe the sky, like a person who doesn't care how many people think they're crazy. 

The words didn't help. They never did.

* 

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Some consequence yet hanging in the stars   
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date  
With this night's revels and expire the term  
Of a despised life closed in my breast   
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.

The man Jondy had talked about was like the villain in one of Ben's stories – a man who kidnapped boys and starved them to death in the basement. He walked aimlessly from room to room, scratching his head at the roots of his greasy blond hair.

Max watched him from one of the windows, her lip curling slightly as she looked at him. When he went into a room where she could see him she cursed quietly and slumped against the side of the house, putting her head in her hands, angry eyes not seeing the ground.

When a high-pitched shriek split the muffled quiet of the abnormal winter, Max jumped up suddenly, just avoiding smashing her head against the windowsill. She was inside superhumanly quick, feet padding against the mouldy linoleum cat-quiet. 

She found the source of the noise in a dank, dark room, colder than the others. The girl that Jondy had been so set on protecting sat in the corner, whimpering. When Max reached out, she recoiled away from the hand, in the same way that Jondy had done. Max felt a sick feeling rise in her stomach as the pieces fell into place.

A noise behind her made her turn, but before she could begin to defend herself against the lunge of the man she'd been watching, he collapsed, without a noise. Max stared at his chest rising up and down slightly, his face slack in unconsciousness, and looked to the figure standing behind him.

Jondy dropped the rock she'd used to knock him out with, and stared at Max. Max smiled for the first time since she'd discovered what was really going on between Jondy and her adoptive father. Some people might have called the turning up at one corner of Jondy's mouth a smile as well.

*

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The all-seeing sun  
Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun.

They sat in the front of Logan's car, Jondy's head on Max's shoulder, Max's arm around her, Presh asleep across their laps, the car heater turned on as warm as it could go. Inside, the winter didn't seem bitter at all.

"You can come to Seattle with me, and we can get Presh some treatment and a _good_ foster family." If it wasn't for the waver in Max's voice, Jondy might have believed that she told people things like this all the time. 

"We can get you a new home." Jondy didn't have to look at her sister's face to know that she was smiling, happy at the thought. "D'you know where you want to live?"

Once, Jondy had lived in Los Angeles. There had been a boy there she had met. He had black hair that contrasted sharply with his pale skin. His eyes were hazel, and they had flecks of grey and brown and blue in them. What Jondy remembered most about him was the look in his eyes, like he was haunted by something, his eyes showing the pain in his soul. Jondy was reminded of him everytime she looked in the mirror. Maybe he was still there. 

"Los Angeles." She said, looking at Max with a fond smile, a smile she hadn't used since Manticore. 

the end.


End file.
